Wednesday, 15 April 2015

Welcome to North Norfolk...

I'm
just back from my annual holiday to North Norfolk.

Luckily
the gales and the rain that had been a feature of the first week of the Easter
break had gone, and we were left with dry weather.Of course, the best day in terms of sunshine
and warmth was the day we were leaving to drive home, but that always seems to
be the way.

We
visited the usual haunts - Cromer, Sheringham, Holt, Wells, Blakeney,
Bewilderwood and went on the steam train which runs on the Poppy Line from
Weybourne.

This
always makes me feel nostalgic - not that I'm old enough to remember steam
trains from the first time around - but transports me to a gentler time,
allowing me to picture myself as Celia Johnson from Brief Encounter or perhaps
an extra in Poirot.

What
I did notice this time generally was the number of dogs on holiday.Obviously with owners, they hadn't packed up
their boxes of gravy bones and headed off of their own accord.

But
there were dogs pretty much everywhere - which is fine, I love dogs; in fact, I
would rather have well-behaved dogs in pubs and restaurants than badly-behaved
squawking people of either the large or small varieties.

On
the downside though it does also mean that there's a lot of what dogs tend to
'create' (please note that I put it delicately in case you're eating while
reading).

On
arrival at Brancaster Beach on our first day we were greeted with the
unedifying sight of seriously overflowing dog poo bins.

Admittedly
this was better than it not having been collected at all, but still, it's not a
great 'Welcome to Norfolk'.

It
also makes me think that when in many thousands of years our children's
children's grandchildren (or whatever it will be) discover all these bags -
because there's no way they're decomposing any time soon - will they wonder why
we valued our dogs' creations so highly we treasured them by encasing them in
plastic for all eternity?